She wrote in shafts of sunlight striking the scrubbed white wood of the old kitchen table. Head bent over her book, words streaming from head to hand to pen to paper. She wrote without looking up until the table disappeared and there was sunlight flickering on the watery ceiling. Rainbow-coloured fish in underwater caves. Silver sand.  Coral chests full of pearls, sapphires, emeralds and rubies.  Mermaids threading pearls into each other’s hair, fastening oyster shells laced with seaweed around their necks. She found similes for their laughter and language, metaphors for her pleasure when they took her hands and guided her into their cave; the cool of their fingers as they smoothed her hair; the sheen of their tails; the deep blue of the bracelet of shells they fastened around her wrist. They said it matched her eyes. They showed her how to play their games and taught her to sing their songs. Too soon it was time for her to leave and they took her back to the surface and waved goodbye.

When she put down her pen and looked up, her father asked if he could read the story. Reluctantly she handed it to him. After a quick glance he dropped the paper on the table, sighed and shook his head. The story was trite, he said. Unrealistic.  Full of  mixed metaphors, sloppy syntax and one-dimensional characters. There was no beginning, no middle and no proper end. The structure was weak. The logic was faulty. How could a human child possibly stay under the sea long enough to do all that? Mermaids? For goodness sake! If the teacher felt generous the story might merit a D.  She should save herself the embarrassment and discard it. He would write a better one for her she could hand in instead.

She read her father’s story next morning on the bus to school. It told of a family meal in a fancy restaurant. He described the food and the dessert in detail: the superb crêpes suzette, the excellent service, the family’s pleasure in the food and in each other, the behaviour of the two children so exemplary that everyone in the restaurant observed that they were a credit to their hard-working parents.

He asked her every day if the story had been marked yet. At the end of the week she said the teacher had given it an A+ and a gold star.  She watched the frown lines leave his face and his tired eyes open wide. He asked her where the story was so he could see the A+ and the gold star. She said it was on the classroom wall. The teacher had put it there so everyone could read it. He smiled. He sparkled. He swelled with pride. He’d always been a bit of a wordsmith, he said.  In a different voice to the one she was used to hearing he suggested she keep the story as a model for her future writing.  She promised she would. She rationalized that no lies were involved.

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Sandra Arnold lives in New Zealand. She is the author of two novels and a book on parental bereavement. She has a MLitt and PhD in Creative Writing from CQ University, Australia. Her short stories have been broadcast on radio and published in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and internationally. She has won several awards. Her flash fiction has been published in Jellyfish Review, Flash Frontier, TSS 500, The Linnet’s Wings, Spelk, The Airgonaut and Blue Fifth Review amongst others. Her work is included in the UK’s 2017 National Flash Fiction Day anthology Sleep is a Beautiful Colour. http://authors.org.nz/author/sandraarnold